Archive for the ‘The Future’ Category

For the CEO – Look around. Look at Europe. Look at China’s plans. Look at the startups. I know you want to achieve your growth objectives, but if you don’t take seriously the race toward cleaner products and services, you’ll go out of business. You can see this as a problem or an opportunity. Bury your head or put on your track shoes and run! It’s your choice.

Look at the oceans. Look at the landfills. Look at the rise in global temperatures. Just look. This isn’t about ROI, this is about survival. Growth objectives aside, no one will buy things when they are struggling to survive in an uncertain future. Your same old dirty products won’t cut it anymore. So, what are you going to do?

For an example of a path forward, look to the companies in the oil business. Their recipe is clear. They’ve got to use their large but ever-diminishing profits to buy themselves into technologies and industries that will ultimately eat their core business. Though the timing is uncertain, it’s certain that improvements in cleaner technologies will demand they make the change.

Whatever you do, don’t wait. You don’t have much time. Cleaner technologies are getting better every day. It’s time to start.

For Marketing – Look at the upstarts. Look at the powerful companies in adjacent markets who will soon be your direct competitors. Look at your stodgy, unprofitable competitors who are now sufficiently desperate to try anything. Their next marketing push will be built on the bedrock of an improved planet. They’ll be almost as good as you in the traditional areas of productivity and quality and they’ll blow your doors off with their meaner and greener products. Customers will choose green over brown. And they’ll look for real improvements that make the planet smile. The time for green-washing is past. That trick is out of gas.

You need to help customers with new jobs to be done. They care about their environment. They care about their carbon footprint. They care about clean water. And they care about recycling and reuse. It’s real. They care. Now it’s up to you to help them make progress in these areas. It will be a tough road to convince your company that things need to change, but that’s why you’re in Marketing.

You’re already behind. It’s time to start. And it’s up to you to lead the charge.

For Manufacturing – Look at your Value Stream Maps (VSMs). Assign a carbon footprint to each link in the chain. And do the same with water consumption. Assess each process step for carbon and water and rank them worst to best. For the worst, run carbon kaizens and improve the carbon footprint. And run water kaizens for the thirstiest processes.

And look again at your VSMs, and look more broadly. Look back into the supply chain, rank for carbon and water and improve the ones that need the treatment. And teach your suppliers how to do it. And look forward into your distribution channels and improve or eliminate the worst actors. And then propose to Marketing that you teach your customers how to use VSMs to clean up their act. And challenge Engineering to change the design to eliminate the remaining bad actors.

You’ve made good progress with your value streams. Now it’s time to help others make the progress that must be made. As subject matter experts, it’s your time to shine. And, please, start now.

For Engineering – Look at your products. Look at how they’re used. Look at how they’re delivered. Look at how they’re made. Look at how they’re recycled. Sure, your products provide good functionality, but throughout their life cycle they also create carbon dioxide and consume water. And you’re the only ones that can design out the environmental impact.

Learn how to do a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Learn which elements of the product create the largest problems. For all the parts that make up the product, sort them worst to best to prioritize the design work. It’s time for radical part count reduction. Try to design out half the parts. It’s possible. And the payoff is staggering. What’s the carbon footprint of a part that was designed out of the product?

Or, to make a more radical improvement, consider an Innovation Burst Event (IBE) to make a fundamental change in the way your products/services impact the environment. With this approach, your innovation work, by definition, will make the planet smile.

It’s time to be open-minded. Ask Manufacturing for the worst processes (including supply chain and distribution) and try to design them out. Design out the part, or change the material, or change the design to enable a friendlier process. Manufacturing can only improve a bad process, but you can design them out altogether. There’s power in that, but with power comes responsibility.

And it’s time for you to take responsibility.

For Everyone in Industry – Regardless of your company, your country or your political affiliation, we can all agree that all our lives get better as the health of our planet improves. And everyone can agree that cleaner air is better. And everyone can agree it’s the same for our water – cleaner is better. And that’s a whole lot of agreement.

As industry leaders, I challenge you to build on that common ground. As industry leaders, I challenge you to improve our planet one product at a time and one process at a time. And as industry leaders, I challenge you to help each other. There’s no competitive disadvantage when you help a company outside your industry. And there’s no shame in learning from companies outside your industry. And it’s good for the planet and profits. There’s nothing in the away. It’s time to start.

As an industry leader, if you want to make a difference in the health of our planet, send me an email at mike@shipulski.com and we will help each other.

Much like living organisms continually evolve to secure their place in the future, technological systems can be thought to display similar evolutionary behavior. Viruses mutate so some of them can defeat the countermeasures of their host and live to fight another day. Technological systems, as an expression of a company’s desire to survive, evolve to defeat the competition and live to pay another dividend.

There are natural limits to evolutionary success in any single direction. When one trait is improved it pushes on the natural limits imposed by the environment. For example, a bacterium let loose in a friendly Petri dish will replicate until it eats all the food in the dish. Or, on a longer timescale, if the mass of a bird increases over generations when its food source is plentiful, the bird will get larger but will also get less agile. The predators who couldn’t catch the fast, little bird of old can easily catch and eat the sluggish heavyweight. In that way, there’s an edge condition created by the environmental Petri dishes and predators. And it’s the same with technological systems.

Companies and their technological systems evolve within their competitive environment by scanning the fitness landscape and deciding where to try to improve. The idea is to see preferential lines of improvement and create new technologies to take advantage of them. Like their smaller biological counterparts, companies are minimum energy creatures and want to maximize reward (profit) with minimum effort (expense) and will continue to leverage successful lines of evolution until it senses diminishing returns.

The diminishing returns are a warning sign that the company is approaching an edge condition (a Petri dish of a finite size). In landscape lingo, there’s a cliff on the horizon. In technology lingo, the rate of improvement of the technology is slowing. In either language, the edge is near and it’s time to evolve in a new direction because this current one is out of gas.

Like the bird whose mass increases over the generations when food is readily available, companies also get fat and slow when they successfully evolve in a single direction for too long. And like the bird, they get eaten by a more agile competitor/predator. And just as the replication rate of the bacterium accelerates as the food in the Petri dish approaches zero, a company that doesn’t react to a slowing rate of technological improvement is sure to outlive its business model.

Biology and technology are similar in that they try new things (create variants of themselves) in order to live another day. But there’s a big difference – where biology is blind (it doesn’t know what will work and what won’t), technology is sighted (people that create use their understanding to choose the variants they think will work best). And another difference is that biological evolution can build only on viable variants where technology can use mental models as scaffolds to skip non-viable embodiments to cross a chasm.

There’s no need to fall off the cliff. As a leading indicator, monitor the rate of improvement of your technology. If its rate of improvement is still accelerating, it’s time to develop the next line of evolution. If its rate is declining, you waited too long. It’s time to double down on two new lines of evolution because you’re behind the curve. And remember, like with the population of bacteria in the Petri dish, sales will keep growing right up until the business model runs out of food or a competitor eats you.

Henry Ford famously said if he asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses. And there’s a lot of truth to his statement. If you ask potential customers what they want next, they’ll give you an answer. And when you show them the prototype, they won’t like it. Their intentions are good and their answers are truthful, but when you give them what they ask for and put the prototype in their hands, they will experience it in a way they did not expect. It will be different than they thought. Thinking how something will be is different than physically interacting with it. That’s how it is with new things.

And just like with the horses, because they don’t know the emergent technologies and their radically different capabilities, they can’t ask for what’s possible. They won’t ask for a combustion engine that eliminates their horses because all they know is horses. They’ll ask for more horses, bigger horses or smaller ones, but they won’t ask for combustion cylinders.

The trick is to understand what people do and why they do it. Like an anthropologist, spend time watching and understanding. And, if you can, understand what they don’t do and why they don’t do it. The new and deeper understanding of their actions, along with the reasons for them, create an anchoring perspective from which to understand how emergent technologies can change their lives.

Technologies evolve along worn paths. And depending on the maturity of the technology, some worth paths are more preferential than others. For example, if fuel economy is stagnant for the last ten years it means it’s likely time for a young technology to emerge that uses a different physical principle such as battery power. Though technology’s evolutionary direction is not predictable in an exact sense, it is dispositional. Like the meteorologist can’t pinpoint where the storm center will hit the coast or predict the maximum wind speed to within one or two miles per hour, she can say which states should hunker down and tell you if the wind will be strong enough to blow out your windows. She cannot predict the specifics, but she knows there’s a storm on the horizon and she knows its character, disposition and tendencies.

Now, anchored in how people use the state-of-the-art technologies (ride horseback, ride in buggies, use a team of horses to pull a heavy wagon) look at what the new technologies want to become (horses to combustion engine) and image how people’s lives would be better (faster trips, longer pleasure rides, heavier payloads, no barns and cleaner streets.) Now, using the new technology, build a prototype and show it to customers. Put them in the driver’s seat and blow their minds. Listen to the questions they ask so you can better understand the technology from their perspective because just as they don’t understand the technology, you don’t understand what the technology means to them, the people who will buy it. Use their questions to improve the technology and the product.

Technologists know technology, technology knows what it wants to be when it grows up and customers know what they want after they see what could be. And to create a new business, it takes all three working together.

Business is about allocating resources to achieve business objectives. And for that, the best place to start is to define the business objectives.

First – what is the timeframe of the business objectives? Well, there are three – short, medium and long. Short is about making payroll, shipping this month’s orders and meeting this year’s sales objectives. Long is about the existence of the company over the next decade and happiness of the people that do the work along the way. And medium – the toughest – is in-between. It’s neither short nor long but bound by both.

People. Short term: pay them so they can eat, pay the mortgage and fund their retirement, provide healthcare, provide a safe workplace, give them work that fits their strengths and give them time to improve their community. Medium: pay them so they can provide for their family and fund their retirement, provide healthcare, provide a safer workplace, give them work that requires them to grow their strengths and give them time to become community leaders. Long: pay them so they can pay for their kids’ college and know they can safely retire, provide the safest workplace, let them choose their own work, and give them time to grow the next community leaders. And make it easy.

Planet. Short term: teach Life Cycle Assessment, Buddhist Economics and TRIZ and create business metrics for them to flourish. Medium: move from global sourcing to local sourcing, move to local production, move from business models based on non-renewable resources to renewable resources. Long: create new business models that are resource neutral. Longer: create business models that generate excess resources. Longest: teach others.

Profit. Short, medium and long – focus on people and planet and the profits will come. But also focus on creating new value for new customers.

For business objectives, here’s the trick on timeframe – always work short term, always work long term and prioritize medium term.

And for the three types of business objectives, focus on people, planet and creating new value for new customers. Profits are a result.

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is technology/product space with ever-increasing performance and an ever-increasing collection of products. There are many different physical principles used to add material and there are a range of part sizes that can be made ranging from micrometers to tens of meters. And there is an ever-increasing collection of materials that can be deposited from water soluble plastics to exotic metals to specialty ceramics.

But AM tools and technologies don’t deliver value on their own. In order to deliver value, companies must deploy AM to solve problems and implement solutions. But where to start? What to do next? And how do you know when you’ve arrived?

To help with your AM journey, below a maturity model for AM. There are eight categories, each with descriptions of increasing levels of maturity. To start, baseline your company in the eight categories and then, once positioned, look to the higher levels of maturity for suggestions on how to move forward.

For a more refined calibration, a formal on-site assessment is available as well as a facilitated process to create and deploy an AM build-out plan. For information on on-site assessment and AM deployment, send me a note at mike@shipulski.com.

Execution

Specify AM machine – There a many types of AM machines. Learn to choose the right machine.

Justify AM machine – Define the problem to be solved and the benefit of solving it.

At some point, what worked last time won’t work this time. It’s not if the business model will go belly-up, it’s when. There are two choices. We can bury our heads in the sands of the status quo, or we can proactively observe the world in a forward-looking way and continually reorient ourselves as we analyze and synthesize what we see.

The world is dynamic, but we behave like it’s static. We have massive intellectual inertia around what works today. In a rearward-looking way, we want to hold onto today’s mental models and we reject the natural dynamism swirling around us. But the signals are clear. There’s cultural change, political change, climate change and population change. And a lower level, there’s customer change, competition change, technology change, coworker change, family change and personal change. And still, we cling to static mental models and static business models. But how to move from static to dynamic?

Continual observation and scanning is a good place to start. And since things become real when resources are allocated, allocating resources to continually observe and scan sends a strong message. We created this new position because things are changing quickly and we need to be more aware and more open minded to the dynamic nature of our world. Sure, observation should be focused and there should be a good process to decide on focus areas, but that’s not the point. The point is things are changing and we will continually scan for storms brewing just over the horizon. And, yes, there should be tools and templates to record and organize the observations, but the important point is we are actively looking for change in our environment.

Observation has no value unless the observed information is used for orientation in the new normal. For orientation, analysis and synthesis is required across many information sources to develop ways to deal with the unfamiliar and unforeseen. [1] It’s important to have mechanisms to analyze and synthesize, but the value comes when beliefs are revised and mental models are updated. Because the information cuts against history, tradition and culture, to make shift in thinking requires diversity of perspective, empathy and a give-and-take dialog. [1] It’s a nonlinear process that is ironed out as you go. It’s messy and necessary.

It’s risky to embrace a new perspective, but it’s far riskier to hold onto what worked last time.

If you put yourself out there and it doesn’t go as you expect, don’t get down. All you are responsible for is your effort and your intentions. You’re not responsible for the outcome. Intentions don’t drive outcomes. In fact, be prepared for your work to bring out the opposite of your intentions.

If you put yourself out there and it goes poorly, don’t judge yourself negatively. Sometimes, things go that way. It’s not a problem, unless you make it one. So, don’t make it one. Just put yourself out there.

The clothes don’t get clean without an agitator. Hold onto that, and put yourself out there.

How do you know you’ve put yourself out there? The status quo is angry with you. The people in power want you to stop. The organization tries to scuttle your work. And the people that know the truth take you out to lunch.

If you put yourself out there and your message is met with 100% agreement, you didn’t put yourself out there. You may have stepped outside the lines, but you didn’t put your whole self on the line. You didn’t splash everyone with a full belly flop. There wasn’t enough sting and your belly isn’t red enough.

You won’t get it right, but put yourself out there anyway. You can’t predict the outcome, but take a run at the status quo. You don’t know how it will turn out, but that’s not a reason to hold back, it’s objective evidence it’s time to take a run at it.

Don’t put yourself out there because it’s the right thing to do, put yourself out there because you have an emotional connection. Put yourself out there because it’s time to put yourself out there. Put yourself out there because you don’t know what else to do.

Be prepared to be misunderstood, but put yourself out there. Expect to be laughed at and talked about behind your back, but put yourself out there. And expect there will be one or two people who will have your back. You know who they are.

If you want to gain ground on your competition you’ve first got to know where things stand. Where are their advantages? Where are your advantages? Where is there parity? To quickly understand the situations there are three tricks: stay at a high level, represent the situation in a clear way and, where possible, use public information from their website.

A side-by-side comparison of the two companies’ products is the way to start. Create a common set of axes with price running south to north and performance (or output) running west to east. Make two copies and position them side-by-side on the page – yours on the left and theirs directly opposite on the right. Go to their website (and yours) and make a list of every product, its price and its output. (For prices of their products you may have to engage your sales team and your customers.) For each of your products place a symbol (the company logo) on your performance-price landscape and do the same for their products on their landscape. It’s now clear who has the most products, where their portfolio outflanks yours and where you outflank them. The clarity and simplicity will help everyone see things as they are – there may be angst but there will be no confusion and no disagreement. The picture is clear. But it’s static.

The areal differences define the gaps to close and the advantages to exploit. Now it’s time to define the momentum and trajectories of the portfolios to add a dynamic element. For your most recent product launch add a one next to its logo, for the second most recent add a two and for the third add three. These three regions of your portfolio are your most recent focus areas. This is your trajectory and this is where you have momentum. Extend and arrow in the direction of your trajectory. If you stay the course, this is where your portfolio will add mass. Do the same for your competitor and compare arrows. You know have a glimpse into the future. Are your arrows pointing in the same directions as theirs? Are they located in the same regions? How would feel if both companies continued on their trajectories? With this addition you have glimpse into the stay-the-course future. But will they stay the course? For that you need to look at the patent landscape.

Do a patent search on their patents and applications over the previous year and represent each with its most descriptive figure. Write a short thematic description for each, group like themes and draw a circle around them. Mark the circle with a one to denote last year’s patents. Repeat the process for two years ago and three years ago and mark each circle accordingly. Now you have objective evidence of the future. You know where they have been working and you know where they want to go. You have more than a glimpse into the future. You know their preferred trajectories. Reconcile their preferred trajectories with their price-performance landscapes and arrows 1, 2 and 3. If their preferred trajectories line up with their product momentum, it’s business as usual for them. If they contradict, they are playing a different game. And because it takes several years for patent applications to publish, they’ve been playing a new game for a while now.

Repeat the process for your patent landscape and flop it onto your performance-price landscape. I’m not sure what you’ll see, but you’ll know it when you see it. Then, compare yours with theirs and you’ll know what the competitive landscape will look like in three years. You may like what you see, or not. But, the picture will be clear. There may be discomfort, but there can be no arguments.

This process can also be used in the acquisition process to get a clear picture a company’s future state. In that way you can get a calibrated view three years into the future and use your crystal ball to adjust your offer price accordingly.

All the scary words are grounded in change. Innovation, by definition, is about change. When something is innovative it’s novel, useful and successful. Novel is another word for different and different means change. That’s why innovation is scary. And that’s why radical innovation is scarier.

Continuous improvement, where everything old is buffed and polished into something new, is about change. When people have followed the same process for fifteen years and then it’s improved, people get scared. In their minds improved isn’t improved, improved is different. And different means change. Continuous improvement is especially scary because it makes processes more productive and frees up people to do other things, unless, of course, there are no other things to do. And when that happens their jobs go away. Every continuous improvement expert knows when the first person loses their job due to process improvement the program is dead in the saddle, yet it happens. And that’s scary on a number of fronts.

And then there’s disruption. While there’s disagreement on what it actually is, there is vicious agreement that after a disruption the campus will be unrecognizable. And unrecognizable things are unrecognizable because they are different from previous experience. And different means change. With mortal innovation there are some limits, but with disruption everything is fair game. With disruption everything can change, including the venerable, yet decrepit, business model. With self-disruption, the very thing responsible for success is made to go away by the people that that built it. And that’s scary. And when a company is disrupted from the outside it can die. And, thankfully, that’s scary.

But change isn’t scary. Thinking about change is scary.

There’s one condition where change is guaranteed – when the pain of the current situation is stronger than the fear of changing it. One source of pain could be from a realization the ship will run aground if a new course isn’t taken. When pain of the immanent shipwreck (caused by fear) overpowers the fear of uncharted waters, the captain readily pulls hard to starboard. And when the crew realizes it’s sink or swim, they swim.

Change doesn’t happen before it’s time. And before things get bad enough, it’s not time.

When the cruise ship is chugging along in fair seas, change won’t happen. Right before the fuel runs out and the generators quit, it’s all you can eat and margaritas for everyone. And right after, when the air conditioning kicks out and the ice cream melts, it’s bedlam. But bedlam is not the best way to go. No sense waiting until the fuel’s gone to make change. Maybe someone should keep an eye the fuel gauge and let the captain know when there’s only a quarter tank. That way there’s some time to point the ship toward the closest port.

There’s no reason to wait for a mutiny to turn the ship, but sometimes an almost mutiny is just the thing.

As a captain, it’s difficult to let things get worse so they can get better. But if there’s insufficient emotional energy to power change, things must get worse. The best captains run close to the reef and scrape the hull. The buffet tables shimmy, the smoked salmon fouls the deck and the liquor bottles rattle. And when done well, there’s a deep groan from the bowels of the ship that makes it clear this is no drill. And if there’s a loud call for all hands on deck and a cry for bilge pumps at the ready, all the better.

To pull hard in a new direction, sometimes the crew needs help to see things as they are, not as they were.

When you’re laying in your camping tent dead tired and wanting for sleep the last thing you want is a rouge mosquito that dive-bombs you continuously throughout the night. With each sortie, it pushes on your expectations of how things should be. This little creature, so small and so powerless, becomes powerful enough to ruin a good night’s sleep. But, really, the mosquito itself doesn’t become powerful at all. You give the mosquito its power, power generated by a mismatch between what you want (sleep) and what is (a little bug flying around). This mismatch causes you assign intent to the mosquito which leads you to tell yourself a story of an insect on a singular mission to upset you. Truth is, the mosquito is on a mission, a mission to teach you the self destructive power of making little things into big things. The mosquito is your teacher.

When it’s time to learn, the best teachers show up as if on command. When things have been going well for a while and you’re getting a little stale, your supportive boss contracts yellow fever to make room for your teacher. Your teacher, in the form of your new boss, shows up the first day with all the wrong answers and the strong desire to standardize on them. Your teacher challenges you to look inside for the motivation to elevate your game and demands you bring creativity and clarity of unrivaled proportions. Your terrible boss doesn’t know enough to ask for the right things so you end up solving oblique problems that on the surface seem meaningless. But, because you had to solve a new problem in a new way you come up with a variant that ends up transforming your mainstream business. Your terrible boss is your teacher.

Due to an economic slowdown, the multinational you work for eliminates your division and you lose your job. As you search for a job and collect unemployment you have a little time so you start a crazy side project. It doesn’t matter if it works because it’s just a diversion from your miserable situation, so you try it. And, as it turns out the impossible is actually possible and you start a whole new business on your prototype. Your miserable situation is your teacher.

Instead of getting angry at your new situation and feeling terrible about yourself, embrace the newness and let it be your teacher. Be humble, watch it unfold and see where it takes you. Use it to see yourself differently. Use it to challenge your assumptions.

And, most importantly, as you take the wild ride, hold on to your hearts best intention.